Raid Setup or One 8mb Cache WD wil do??

[mata2974]

I need an opinion whether I should set up two WD 30GB 7200 RPM drives in RAID 0 array or use my existing 100GB 8mb Cache WD JB second edition. Which setup gives me faster and better setup.

[Graphic67]

I am facing that same sort of choice. I have 30 GB Maxtors on one machine an am about to add a 160GB Western Digital JB drive to the system.

Right now, I think I will convert my two 30's to raid 0 and use the 160 for more mundane storage. I also like to use the large drive for storage of Norton Ghost images of my OS and data partitions.

[Caffinehog]

Graphic67 is right... the best setup would be a pair of 30's in raid 0 for all your OS an program files, and then your extra 100gig drive for storage.

[mata2974]

I was gonna do what Grahics67 suggested, it makes sence, but I am still curious which HD setup is faster, if at all noticeable....I havnt seen any benchmarks ?

[nikhsub1]

Originally posted by mata2974
I was gonna do what Grahics67 suggested, it makes sence, but I am still curious which HD setup is faster, if at all noticeable....I havnt seen any benchmarks ?
Raid0 will typically be 50-60% faster than a single drive. This is THROUGHPUT though, not seek times. Seek times actually go down a bit with raid 0 as compared to a single drive.

[rogue3092]

Originally posted by nikhsub1

Raid0 will typically be 50-60% faster than a single drive. This is THROUGHPUT though, not seek times. Seek times actually go down a bit with raid 0 as compared to a single drive.

Dont you mean the access times go UP with RAID?

[mateo]

What do you do? If you game, stick with the SE. If you play around with huge files, go with the RAID.

[mata2974]

Riight now I just finished reinstalling XP and I went with Raid and the JB will be for backup only. For some reason when I double click to start an application the computer kind of hesitate and then go, or maybe do I need to change the Nforce Drivers.? Anyway thanks for the info

[thorilan]

Dont you mean the access times go UP with RAID?

what nik said was correct seek times in ms go up .

[mata2974]

Well I went ahead and set up Raid0 with the two 30GB and the performance is kind of lame. I am not happy. Take a look at the comparisons. Besides going wit 16K stripe what else can improve my scores, I have already updated the Promise bios and drivers

http://www.genesistabernacle.com/images/raid0_30G.jpghttp://www.genesistabernacle.com/images/100mb_WD_JB.jpg

[Bobby]

There's definitely something wrong with one of the drives in your raid. I was playing around with 2 20gb 5400 drives and I was getting ~40mb/s read and writes.

Check to see if those drives are running DMA or PIO. They should be set to DMA.

Also, try running atto with the queue depth to 10.

-Bobby

[mateo]

Make sure nothing in the background is running when you do ATTO, as that will usually screw things up. Also, play around with different ATTO settings, you might see drastic changes in how it benches.

[Graphic67]

My recently created raid 0 setup has what I consider good performance considering I am using two 3-year-old Maxtors (30GB, 7200rpm).

Sequential Read = 63 MB/sec
Sequential Write = 52 MB/sec

On the same machine, a 60GB 5400rpm Western Digital drive scores:

Sequential Read = 24 MB/sec
Sequential Write = 24 MB/sec

On another system, a 160GB Wester Digital (8MB buffer, 7200 rpm):

Sequential Read = 39 MB/sec
Sequential Write = 19 MB/sec

[mata2974]

I always benchmark right after window s load, nothing running, increasing
queue depth to 10 only makes it worse. The are all set to DMA
I will try to rebuild the array with 16k size, before I get another JB

[Bobby]

mata - are you looking for high benchmarks or accurate benchmarks? Everyone uses max total length and queue depth for accuracy. Anything other than that, you're just fooling yourself.

I had similar looking benchmarks with my maxtor sata drives (numbers were higher but same pattern) and it turned out that one of my drives was bad. I rma'd it and got a new one and it's much more consistent.

Try using speedfan to look for SMART errors on the two raid drives. It looks like you have a write problem on one of your drives but the reads look inline for your setup.

-Bobby

[mata2974]

I have never used that program, where can I get it, I will try that and post when I get home about my findings

[Bobby]

www.almico.com/speedfan.php

-Bobby

[mata2974]

problem is the SMART tab is blank even though its enabled in the bios.